Finally Published! The Dear Blogger Toolbox

As you know, I regularly recommend products, to provide answers, both at the blog and on social media. For a while now I had been thinking of creating a “toolbox” that you could return to again and again for the sake of convenience. But like so many things in life, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Well when a reader wrote in asking “what exactly should I install after I start a blog?” I figured the time had come.

So I present you with the complete (and short) list of tools used at Dear Blogger. Feel free to shop around for your own blog, and remember, just because I’m old-fashioned, doesn’t mean I don’t have a few tricks up my sleeve.

p.s. If you have any suggestions of your own, I bet everyone would really enjoy hearing from you! I’ll make this post into a page soon and link it in our menu above, so any comments should give you some good long-lasting visibility!

WordPress Plugins

We’ll kick off this list with the free plugins powering Dear Blogger, then move on to the more robust, paid software.

Always Edit in HTML – If you prefer editing blog posts in the Text tab as opposed to the Visual tab, then this plugin is for you. Visual tab sure is a nice option (especially with the new TinyMCE update for 3.9) but it can remove things like JavaScipt and create weird formatting on lists and images.

Dynamic Widgets – You may want to only show a widget on certain posts or pages. This plugin does exactly that.

Easy Spoiler – Just another cool way you can hide information, which I used in the blog’s early days.

[spoiler title=”Who hid the treasure?”]Jack did.[/spoiler]

Google XML Sitemaps – An absolute must, this plugin sends your new content express overnight delivery to the search engines so you can get indexed and ranked quicker.

TF Social Share – Let the discussions on the “best social media share plugin” ensue, because my vote is in! TF social share gives you lots of social media buttons, a few styleouts, and less interruption on your other plugins.

WordPress SEO! – Yoast’s golden child, this plugin has tons of free SEO options my favorite being how you can set exactly how posts show up in the search results with titles, snippets and more.

WP-Click-Tracker – This old-time plugin will track which links on your blog get the most clicks from the moment you install it. It definitely surprises me at times!

WP Hide Post – Very useful for hiding posts or pages, like your eBook landing page, on the blog, in search results, and everywhere else!

Sure, we’ve all downloaded that one plugin fingers crossed hoping it saves us on the issue at hand. But if you don’t want to go out on a limb anymore, I recommend bookmarking this page to make use of the research I’ve already done here.

Moving on now…

*The simple circles used to form “Bull’s Eye” were also used to design the coffee cup logo used on the blog from 2012 – present.

Basic Software

Here’s the (short) list of the software I use and recommend. As always, the links to HostGator, Aweber and Theme-Junkie are of the affiliate nature.

To show you this page is truly just meant for resources there are no affiliate links here. We’re doing it differently, which shouldn’t surprise you. 🙂

Neither this blog would nor the community I’ve built would exist without these tools, and I only recommend those which I honestly can’t live without.

I’ve also linked the best resource posts to help you out if you’re a new user, and will always keep the comments open on these posts.

WordPress – Known for its elegance, and ease of use, used by nearly 20% of the whole Web. WordPress makes it easy to run a blog or professional business website and the best part is they make it fun.

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31 Responses to "Finally Published! The Dear Blogger Toolbox"

Hi Greg. Trying to pick a social media plug in and found that for the theme I’m using it isn’t recommended by WordPress because it hasn’t been updated in a couple of years. I really appreciate your tips and help so wanted to check in. Do you still recommend it or do you have a new favorite for 2017?

This is really cool Greg. I know that many new bloggers could greatly benefit from this in oh so many ways. It’s too bad that this wasn’t available when I had first started out a few years ago. I could have avoided some, now obvious, mistakes for sure. 🙂

Hi Greg; congrats on getting the tool box added. I understand that this is an important step as many bloggers make a majority of their income from affiliate sales of tools plug ins widgets etc. I hope it brings you much success. Take care, Max

Something that people don’t seem to think about are the images on the site. I highly recommend smush.it (http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/) or get the plug in. It’s made by Yahoo and if you use the plug in, it will automatically remove extra tags and info from the picture and optimize it for the web (lower file size = faster load times).

No problem. Another thing for the audience (this was something I learned the hard way) – if you’re using Photoshop for pictures, save images as “for web and devices.” It further compresses the image and makes it a smaller file versus just regular .jpeg or .png. You can also use free image software available online.

Wow! You’ve surely shared a lot of great tools here. Some of these tools I use and others I avoid as well. For example, if you are using WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, you don’t need Google XML Sitemaps. And things like that.

But then, this is a great list for anybody who wants to start blogging professionally. Thanks for sharing!

I think this toolbox will be a hit with your readers, Greg. It taught me a thing or two, too! I love learning from you. You are always honest and forthcoming in your posts. As you know, I am a huge fan of transparency and admire all bloggers who are not afraid of being this way. Thank you for this!

Thanks Greg. Very timely for a Tool-Box checklist as I am currently researching Site-Map Plug-Ins. Do you know when Google XML was updated. All the options on my Word press dashboard seem outdated and not known if they work with latest version. Thanks !

About DearBlogger

DearBlogger is a free WordPress resource and community geared towards providing you free and fast advice to build a better blog. DearBlogger was founded in September 2012 in Manhattan by Greg Narayan. Our mission on this site is to provide clearer answers than what's out there currently, and make blogging, advertising, online marketing, web design, eCommerce, and any kind of website creation mainly using WordPress easier for beginners.